ABSTRACT
This chapter will describe the place of art and space at the centre of a protest movement at the University of Cape Town in 2015 and 2016. In an impinging environment, with spaces experienced as still colonial in their effects, the dismantling of various taken-for-granted adornments signalled the beginning of a decolonial movement. The relationship of performance art to the dismantling, the complex meaning of the defiant spontaneous gesture, the ruthless insistence on refusing compliance in relation to expression of the true self will map the path through this rupture with the past. The chapter will describe the ways in which works of art become transitional objects, crafting the potential space within which new spontaneous gesture might arise. I will also suggest that works of art, in providing a transitional space between apparently objective representation of reality and subjective meanings, have an important role to play in the process of confounding alienation, disrupting compliance, and healing fractures between what is false and what is true.
